Except that it isn't like a VISOR at all. It doesn't enable people to see who cannot see without it, it simply acts as a high-tech magnifying glass for people who have limited vision.
For now. It is a beginning. Today it's eSight, and folks who were legally blind can now see things and people they couldn't. Maybe tomorrow - probably many tomorrows - it will be the Visor.
I'm just getting annoyed at all the various, "look, it's totally something out of Star Trek" type stuff and when one looks at it, it really isn't the case. Like people saying the cell phone is a communicator because it flips open.
And as was pointed out when Enterpoop was launched, smartphones now do more than Kirk's communicator did.
Only in the sense that they are computers. They cannot communicate with a ship in orbit or use subspace, though. Actually they have such shitty range that there are plenty of areas in the US where that smart phone is no better than any other computer without an internet connection, other than its portability. Compare that to the ground-to-orbit distance is, and without any kind of a network to support it. Also a built-in, real-time universal translator. A far better comparison to a modern smart phone would be the PADD.
Smartphones can communicate with objects in orbit, provided it has Skype or something similar. There have been many video calls made between the ISS and Earth's surface to computers. There's no sense in denying that couldn't occur with smartphones. Pointing out that Trek-like technologies don't exist exactly as they existed in Star Trek is absurd. Such technologies were only theorized in the last few decades, there's no reason to expect them to be 100% similar as how they are in the show. To suggest otherwise is to be ignorant of how technology develops. The fact that these early stages of these technologies has happened so soon after they were theorized, but still hundreds of years before they are fictionaly used, is remarkable.
So it doesn't have direct communication then? Let alone FTL communication through subspace? What's absurd is the reasoning that since cell phones flip open, they are the same as communicators. So based entirely on window dressing rather than function. Which this article is actually another example of, I might add.
Again, these technologies represent the initial steps towards the full technologies that Star Trek theorized about. It is unrealistic to expect the first iterations to be as fully functional as their fictional counterparts. The fact that we are as far along as we are is remarkable, because up until a few decades ago, these technologies were pure fiction.